Deliberate Detours as Paths to Emergent Knowledge Creation

Abstract

Contributing to theoretical fields of innovation and collaboration across public sectors can follow many routes: The highways built on mountains of journal articles in order to sense the “state of the art”; the boulevards of participatory ethnography, studying people struggling to find new solutions to wicked problems across sector boundaries; or the paths of spending (way) too much time as co-founder in a participatory citizen start-up project. This is the story of initiating deliberate detours as an approach to emergent knowledge creation. This approach builds on trusting yourself to get off the main roads and heading off into emerging fields, trusting that sense and meaning will materialize through actions and that detours will provide significant knowledge about innovation and collaboration at the intersections.